School for the Friendless had an interesting concept but I didn’t like how it was executed. Basically unless you went right along the predefined paths they had setup you could not even get past the first part of finding a room mate. I prefer when my natural choices make organic changes to the story and which branches I take. Here I felt very pigeon holed. This is usually an issue I faced in games that have “true endings”, they only take time to make a well thought out ending for those and path for what they want you to take. I liked the characters themselves as well as the art which was a nice blend of anime for the people and a more realistic background. I found some of the humour a little flat and over used. The first couple times that a “censored” sign came up in dialogue or on screen was funny but after that the remaining half dozen times were stale.

    I played School for the Friendless on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or bugs. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You could manually save whenever you wanted and there were 54 save slots.

Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.4.1439
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 398 MB
Game Version Played: 1.1

GPU Usage: 0-38 %
VRAM Usage: 618-881 MB
CPU Usage: 2-6 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-2.6 GB

    Overall while the characters and art were great the rest of the game left a lot to be desired. The visual novel genre is a crowded one where a lot better options lie than this. I finished 2 endings in 42 minutes of play time.

My Score: 5/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.2.3 | Manjaro 21.1.6 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.14.10-1-MANJARO